Securing Cyber Resilience in Health and Care: a Progress Update
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Securing cyber resilience in health and care: A progress update February 2018 DH ID box Title: Securing cyber resilience in health and care: A progress update Author: DDP/Cyber Security and Innovation/13920 Document Purpose: Policy Publication date: January/2018 Target audience: Parliament, Public, NHS providers, GP practices, Clinical Commissioning Groups, Commissioning Support Units Contact details: Digital, Data and Primary Care, Department of Health, Quarry House, Leeds / 39 Victoria Street, London You may re-use the text of this document (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence. To view this licence, visit website www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/ © Crown copyright 2016 Published to gov.uk, in PDF format only. website www.gov.uk/dh 2 Introduction The scale of the challenge Cyber-attacks are an increasing global threat. There are regular reports of attacks impacting on different sectors and different countries around the world. The NHS has faced a number of cyber-attacks. The May 2017 WannaCry cyber-attack was unprecedented and the largest ever ransomware cyber-attack. And while it was not the target, WannaCry affected the NHS. With the next large-scale attack more of a question of "when" not "if", there remains a need for the health and care system to remain resilient against attack, to protect patient data and patient care. Since 2010 the Department of Health and Social Care (‘the Department’), working with its Arms- Length Bodies (ALBs), has led a significant programme to strengthen cyber resilience across health and care. In that time the Department has: • Supported NHS organisations to move off unsupported software systems; • Set up CareCERT1, a pioneering sector-specific national cyber support service; • Commissioned reviews by Dame Fiona Caldicott as National Data Guardian and the Care Quality Commission to reinforce cyber resilience across health and care, which recommended 10 Data Security Standards for health and care organisations; • Included these 10 Data Security Standards in the NHS Standard Contract; • Revised the Care Quality Commission "Well Led" inspection programme to include an assessment of cyber resilience; and • Commissioned a review by the Chief Information Officer for Health and Care on the lessons to learn from WannaCry. It was a result of the Department's programme of work and investment that most health and care organisations were unaffected by WannaCry last May. However, despite this programme of activity, WannaCry still affected at least 802 out of 236 NHS trusts. A further 603 primary care and other organisations were infected, including 595 out of 7,454 GP Practices. The NHS responded well to this attack, with no reports of harm to patients or patient data being lost. Government response There has been a long-standing Government-wide prioritisation of cyber security resilience, with the establishment of the National Cyber Security Centre to support this. The Department, together with its ALBs, has worked closely with the National Cyber Security Centre, the Cabinet Office and the National Crime Agency to ensure that the health sector plays its part in bringing cyber attackers to justice. Immediately after WannaCry, the Department took a number of further actions to ensure health and care organisations had strong cyber security measures established to be best placed to mitigate against cyber-attacks. In July 2017, the Department published Your Data: Better Security, Better Choice, Better Care in which it formally accepted the National Data Guardian's 1 CareCERT: Care Computer Emergency Response Team. 3 A progress update 10 Data Security Standards. As part of this, an implementation plan on securing data and cyber security was published which set out how we plan to deliver key data and cyber security actions. This included commissioning a review of WannaCry from the Chief Information Officer for the health and social care system in England to analyse the lessons learned, assess the actions required to reduce the risk and impact of a future cyber-attack and to make clear recommendations as to how this learning can be shared and implemented across the whole health and social care system. All actions set out in that plan have either been delivered or are in progress. This document summarises these actions. Making sure the NHS is as prepared as possible for cyber- attacks Incident response The Department reviewed its Data Security Incident Response Plan and NHS England led work to develop a system-wide Data and Cyber Security Operations Playbook. These set out clearly the roles and responsibilities of organisations and individuals during an incident. In December 2017, the Department tested these plans, alongside the key organisations, via a simulated table top cyber-attack exercise. Exercises such as this are an important part of the preparedness process, but in order to be most effective, lessons identified need to be reflected on, implemented, and then tested again. The Department and its ALBs held a de-brief after the exercise to capture the lessons identified, and are now taking these forward as the response plans go through their next iteration. Helping NHS organisations to address infrastructure weaknesses Patching Patching (also referred to as patch management) is a security practice designed to pro-actively prevent the exploitation of IT vulnerabilities that exist within an organisation. Before WannaCry, NHS Digital had issued CareCERT alerts to health and care organisations on how to respond effectively and safely to cyber security threat. However, WannaCry highlighted inadequate patching systems by infected NHS organisations despite patching advice from NHS Digital. Since WannaCry, NHS Digital has implemented CareCERT Collect, a system through which all NHS Trusts and Commissioning Support Units (CSUs), on behalf of CCGs, have to report within 48 hours on action they have taken on High Severity CareCERT alerts (i.e. implementing security patches and updating their anti-virus software). 100% of NHS trusts and CSUs were signed up by January 2018. Funding Following WannaCry, the Digital Delivery Board (the governing board for the Personalised Health and Care 2020 programme which oversees better use of data and technology) reprioritised £21m capital for our major trauma centre hospitals and ambulance trusts. This funding is being used to upgrade firewalls and network infrastructure, and support the transition from outdated hardware and operating systems to improve resilience. These organisations were asked to undergo independent on-site assessments before applying for some of this funding which they could use to tackle high priority critical infrastructure vulnerabilities identified in their assessments. Trusts have now been allocated their share of the £21m. This funding is helping to build resilience by: 4 Appendix A: Timeline of actions • Upgrading firewalls to secure networks; • Minimising risk to medical devices i.e. MRI scanners and blood test analysis devices; • Supporting use of software to fix security vulnerabilities or upgrades for software applications and technologies (also referred to as "patching") by replacing obsolete PCs and introducing device security tools; and • Improving anti-virus protection. A further £25m of capital funding has been identified in 2017/18 to support organisations that have self-assessed as being non-compliant against high severity CareCERT alerts, strengthening hardware and software across the system. A rigorous reprioritisation exercise is underway across the NHS IT portfolio to identify additional cyber investment between 2018/19 and 2020/21. As part of this, an initial £150m has been identified focused on continuing investment in local infrastructure as well as national systems and services to improve monitoring, resilience and response. Options for further reprioritisation and additional investment for cyber security are being looked at as future plans are refined. In addition to this national funding, local organisations will need to commit local capital and revenue funding to maintain and refresh their own IT estates, and to ensure that these are operating on supported versions of software. Unsupported systems The National Data Guardian and the Department have been clear that organisations should not be operating IT systems which are no longer developed or updated as these lack modern security controls and cannot cope with large volumes of data and multiple users. Around 4.7% of NHS devices were operating on Windows XP at the time of WannaCry. This is now 1.8% as at January 2018. In July 2017, NHS Digital published guidance to help local organisations to move off unsupported systems and to minimise the risk of unsupported systems where they are in use. As we move closer towards the end of extended support for Windows 7 in 2020, there is the need for organisations to continue to review and replace their systems, including where appropriate taking advantage of the guides and services offered by NHS Digital and through the Microsoft Custom Support Agreement (see below). NHS Digital agreed a Custom Support Agreement with Microsoft at the end of June 2017 which provided the following free services to NHS organisations: • Patching and support for Windows devices operating with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Sequel server 2005; • Improved threat awareness through Microsoft’s Enterprise Threat Detection (ETD) service; • Windows 10 migration support,